Starbucks wasn't about a literal grab for land. it's not that hard to find locations for coffee shops. It was a grab for a piece of culture.

The US didn't have enough coffee houses with good coffee and that kind of an atmosphere. If Starbucks had taken 10 years to get to LA, there would have been Starbucks-like coffee houses there by that time.

I don't even think Starbucks needed the culture, except for branding. If they make it into your morning ritual, you -- one individual customer -- are worth $1,000 a year. Every store they drop down is just another vending machine to recruit $1,000-a-year walking bags of money. This gives them expansion imperatives similar to a bank's desire to situate branches, or a cell phone company's desire to site stores.

That is more or less what I meant by culture: to become a part of a city/office/industry/person's culture. The culture was forming and if they didn't become part of it, some other cafe would have been the place where you go for your morning brew, George and Jenny meet on Tuesdays or the theatre school people go to use the internet.

I agree. One problem with the analogy is that Starbucks is all about coffee. StackOverflow is about a Q&A platform. It'd be like Starbucks using their store model to be a donut shop, a hamburger stand, and a BBQ joint. In my opinion, the 37 signals post nails it with the problems.